As the ability to step out of the singular umwelt of one's particular species and make contact with another shape of sensitivity, another style of sentience, which verges on—and I mean, let's keep holding all these things close—what for me is maybe the most profound sense of magic...

The lens required now is not a microscope, but a macroscope: a device for seeing at a far vaster scale – both in space and time – than we are used to.

What we perceive as borders and conflicts – the things which separate us – often turn out not to be artefacts of the exterior world, but immeasurable gaps in our own conceptions, abilities and tools of discernment. We think we are studying the world – but in reality we are merely making evident the limits of our own thinking, which are embodied in

of the connections between them. They tapped into our millennia-old desire to understand the mind—indeed, to make sense of intelligence itself—wading further into abstraction than I’d ever ventured, all while they maintained an unmistakably humanistic thread. They exemplified the virtues of science—rigorous and hypothesis-driven—but without ever sa